Where Science and Religion MeetPalmer, William Scott
Religion
Where Science and Religion Meet
Palmer, William Scott
Religion and science
There are examples of highly complex union to be seen in the chemist's
laboratory and elsewhere which are never called living matter. The
chemist speaks of some of them as colloids (we should naturally call
many of these jellies, or gums) and he calls protoplasm a colloid too.
They have remarkable properties, and the new bio-chemist thinks he may
some day make that elaborate colloid with more remarkable properties,
which we know as protoplasm. He thinks also that we do ill to confine
the first production of life-jellies to the age of steaming seas and
cloud-shadowed lagoons, before the Pre-Cambrian geologic times. He tells
us that in his opinion it may always be going on and always have gone on
since the earth was cool enough to permit of it. He thinks that if all
the living creatures we are aware of were swept out of the world to-day
there would still be living stuff remaining on it of which we are
ignorant now; and that in the course of millenniums this would people it
once more. The beginnings of the life-jelly must be so small as to be
far out of the reach of our microscopes and every other tool we can
bring to bear, as yet, he says. And there, doubtless, he is right.
Let us suppose that he is right, too, in his main contention. Let us
look at inorganic matter with a new eye, seeing in its evolutionary
change the forerunner of greater change and greater evolution, the
preparer of the narrow pathway by which life approaches to its display,
and at last enters on possession of a body that in union with it shall
be the germ of lives to come—enters the realm of physical forces and the
relative necessity of material things, where and by use of those forces
it will subdue necessity to the purposes of freedom. This indeed seems
to be the manner and purposing of life as it extends from the single
cell to the assemblage of cells that constitutes my body. There is
continuity from first to last; and yet the differences between me and
the primitive jelly-speck are even more striking than the resemblances.
Students of the cell itself and students of my body as merely composed
of cells are, naturally, cytologists, histologists, physiologists,
embryologists, and the like. But unless there are others, unless
students of psychology, ethics, aesthetics, social science, history, and
many more, bring their minds to bear on me, I am studied to little sense
and in small part. I am obliged to regard myself as not only physical
but psychical; I seek after, and sometimes find, goodness and truth and
beauty. I admire, I hate or love. I am a hero or a criminal, or both. I
sin. In the advance of life from the minute and primitive colloid lump
to me amazing things have happened. When I see life making its humble
appearance by that speck of jelly, I must in my mind's eye connect it
with what I am, and see there in its almost inchoate wonders the promise
of myself. And still I must look behind even that first living thing and
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